Know-It-All Society

by Michael P. Lynch

  It is a confusion to blame identity politics for intellectual arrogance on the Left. More to blame is the relativism about truth and knowledge that is sometimes associated with such politics—even though it is not essential to them.

  The Rationality Brand

  One of Conservapedia’s chief examples of liberal arrogance is the 2016 election, about which it says, “Virtually the entire liberal media arrogantly proclaimed that the election of Hillary Clinton was ‘inevitable’ and a ‘foregone conclusion.’ ”18

  This claim is fair enough, but it was not just the liberal media that made this mistake. It was liberals themselves. A common idea, especially during the spring of 2016, that was passed around at progressives’ dinner parties was that the country could not be so “dumb/racist/sexist/____” as to elect Donald Trump. He could not be taken seriously. He was an obvious huckster, a fraud and a liar, more an object of ridicule than a serious political opponent. The one to fear, many thought, was Ted Cruz. Or even Marco Rubio. But not Trump. Many of my friends, moreover, thought that the arc of history, not to mention demographics, was bending toward the Democrats. It was time for a woman president and Democrats had the female candidate, while Republicans had backed the most openly misogynist candidate ever to run for office.

  Many liberals only started to doubt this narrative very late in the game. One troubling sign was a minor kerfuffle the week before the election over statistician Nate Silver’s predictions for the presidential race. At the time, HuffPost and other media sites were predicting well over a 90 percent chance of victory for Clinton. But right before the election, Silver lowered his prediction to 65 percent, alarming many on the Left. After all, this was the man who had successfully predicted that Barack Obama would win in 2012 (over Republican pollsters who had been forecasting a confident victory for the Right). Snarling that Silver was “putting his thumb on the scales,” HuffPost loudly denounced his tactics.19 Silver just as loudly defended them, pointing out that he was simply trying to adjust for the possibility that many of the polls were making some background assumptions that might just turn out to be wrong. It all got rather nasty on social media, and I remember thinking that if we liberals were really so confident (after all, Silvers was still predicting that Trump had only a 35 percent chance!), then why were we so set on the idea not just that Trump would lose, but that we all had to agree that it was almost certain Trump would lose?

  In retrospect, this was a sign that intellectual arrogance was indeed at work on the Left during that election. For many on the Left, a self-defensive concern for our tribe’s collective self-esteem was more important for what they believed than was the truth itself. We were living in bad faith.

  After the election, this realization caused a paroxysm of collective self-doubt, anger, shock, and disbelief—all of which are pretty common when a political party loses an election. At the university where I work in New England, some professors canceled classes, some students didn’t get out of bed, and talk about needing counseling shot up. Fox News had a field day. Trump’s victory seemingly vindicated its viewership’s position that universities are riddled with liberals and snowflakes. And it was consistent with the thought that for many Trump voters, the most important thing wasn’t policy, but seeing arrogant liberals (and the party of a black president) getting their comeuppance.

  This conservative attitude betrays its own kind of arrogance. But I also think there is no avoiding the fact that conservatives are reacting to something that is real and present in the way that many liberals see the world and that encompasses the liberal ideology of arrogance. We might gloss that something as “liberals know best.” We are in command of the facts; they aren’t. We are rational and scientific; they aren’t. We are compassionate; they aren’t. We are not racist or sexist; they are.

  These are the sorts of assumptions that lead so many on the Left to often act as if all conservatives must be not just mistaken in their values but dumb (because they don’t know the facts) and/or duped (because they’ve been tricked into ignoring the facts). In other words, liberal Democrats tend to think of themselves as the “knowing” party, bound by its common knowledge of the real facts: “Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you’re actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn’t know any better. Knowing all the jokes that signal this knowledge.”20

  One can quarrel with these examples. And it would be wrong to assume that liberals are more prone to groupthink than conservatives. There is more than enough of that to go around on all sides. What is important is that widespread unquestioned assumptions are all the more problematic when anti-groupthink is part of your self-conscious brand. And it is hard to argue with the idea that being the party of “critical thinking” is part of liberals’ own conception of themselves. Liberals represent the politics of knowledge and reason; conservatives represent the politics of emotion and blind faith.

  This (mis)identification is rooted in two debates that, while distinct, are often conflated. The older of the two is philosophical. It concerns the role that traditional liberal political philosophy suggests that reason plays in political justification. That view is long-standing and predates current political divisions. It stems, in part, from attempts by philosophers as different as Rousseau, Locke, and Kant to ground democratic politics in reason and experience—an attempt that saw its apex in the twentieth-century philosophical work of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. The thought, very broadly speaking, is that legitimate democratic policies, at least in the ideal, would result from free and reasoned agreement between equal citizens. Democratic governments didn’t enforce their will by appeal to either divine right, custom, or social tradition alone.

  Old-school liberal theory’s reliance on ideals of rationality to ground democracy has long been a target of conservative intellectuals from Edmund Burke onward. Michael Oakeshott, for example, a philosophical hero of traditional conservatism in the United States and Britain, influentially argued during the mid-twentieth century that liberal political philosophy is a kind of rationalism, and that this rationalism, and its consequent spurning of traditional community norms, is its undoing. The liberal, Oakeshott argued, saw himself as “the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once skeptical and optimistic. . . . Moreover he is fortified by a belief in ‘reason’ common to all mankind.”21

  Oakeshott saw the liberal attitude as dangerously naïve. The problem was its implicit assumption that, in rising above tradition, it can rise above prejudice and bias. But, Oakeshott argued, this it could not do, because knowledge is always formed in the context of a tradition, a custom, a way of life. His reasoning anticipated similar criticism of traditional liberalism later made from the Right by writers such as Roger Scruton and David Brooks, and from the Left by Richard Rorty, Judith Butler, Charles Mills, and others. Traditional liberal philosophy portrayed itself as immune from bias, these critics warned, but that attitude only served to hide its own prejudices from itself. It perpetuates a form of bad faith and, therefore, a kind of intellectual arrogance.

  This is an important criticism, although I still believe that the giving of and asking for reasons is a central stone in democracy’s foundation. Moreover, we can defend reasons, and certain aspects of liberal political philosophy, without defending the idea that human beings are Reasoners with a capital R—that we are unembodied logical inference machines. We might say that reasons matter for democracy, but Reason, not so much.22

  Whatever the outcome of this first philosophical debate—concerning the foundations of democracy—it is different from another, more explicitly political debate that is sometimes confused with it. This second debate is about whether liberal progressivism is somehow tied to intellectual elitism. This debate is more mainstream—and is often distorted by thos
e on both the Left and the Right.

  One way that concerns over intellectual elitism show up is in shifts in attitudes toward higher education. Consider, for example, the growing suspicion of universities by many on the Right. The Pew Research Center reported in 2017 that 58 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say that institutions of higher education have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country, while just 36 percent say that their effect is positive. That number is, frankly, astounding. It is astounding not only because even Republicans who acknowledge they have benefited financially from college feel that way but because, just two years ago, attitudes were actually flipped: a 54 percent majority of Republicans and Republican leaners said that universities were having a positive effect, while 37 percent said their effect was negative.23 In other words, in the span of just two years most Republicans have gone from thinking institutions of higher education are helping the country to thinking they’re hurting it.

  And it seems pretty clear that the harm that conservatives think universities are imposing on the country isn’t financial; it’s cultural. An old college friend of mine—very liberal when young but more conservative now—confided to me that he was, in fact, deeply worried about higher education, even as he saved to send his kids to the best schools. He worried because “it seems like no one has an open mind anymore. Students just want to shout people down.” He had in mind “no-platforming” protests against conservative campus speakers, or incidents, such as one at my own university, in which student activists put a halt to a conservative provocateur defending the idea that “it is okay to be white.” (Which seems, frankly, like getting up to defend the idea that it is okay to like ice cream. No one really has been worrying about it, have they?) That these incidents are markedly different is worth pointing out: just a few years ago students were protesting nerdy Harvard professors; now they are protesting active white supremacists. Nonetheless, my friend had a point, and one that many progressive faculty members worry about too, if only because pushing antidemocratic ideas underground doesn’t make them go away.

  In any event, the idea that universities are bastions of liberalism is neither new nor surprising, largely because it is true. A number of studies over the last decade, some quite recent, have supported the basic perception held by most students and faculty themselves: that faculty at universities and colleges lean largely left. In New England, liberal faculty members have been found to outnumber conservatives twenty-eight to one.24 Critics on both the Right and the Left (for example, Jonah Goldberg and Nicholas Kristof ) often portray the humanities and social sciences as ground zero for this disparity—where, according to these views, fields are run largely by professors of ethnic and gender studies.25

  But while it is true that many historians, sociologists, and philosophers, for example, have led the way in theorizing about identity, it isn’t clear that such fields are more dominated by liberal-leaning academics than are the sciences. Indeed, the data points in the other direction. Even in 2009, according to Pew, only 6 percent of scientists working in the United States identified as Republicans.26 This suggests that your average neighborhood physicist, just like your neighborhood philosopher, is far more likely than the average American to be liberal and not particularly religious, and to give to Democratic politicians over Republicans.

  Since liberal dominance of academe is not new, the amazing uptick in negative attitudes toward colleges and universities among conservatives can’t be credited simply to conservatives’ sudden discovery that liberals are teaching their kids (“I’m shocked—shocked—to find liberalism going on in this establishment!”). Instead, this rising negativity seems more likely to be the result of other factors, including both an increase in the attention of media like Fox News and the upswing of anti-elite rhetoric in the Trump era. Looked at through this newly dominant frame, the academy represents the clearest case—even more so than Hollywood, another conservative target—of the idea that “intellectual elites” are both politically out of line with the rest of the country and arrogant know-it-alls that look down on the hardworking average American.

  But it is far from clear that liberal dominance has had the effects that its detractors fear, since most students, liberal or conservative, seem to go through college without changing their political views.27 The real issue with liberal dominance of higher education, then, is not its immediate practical effects. It is not leading to the great social change hoped for by progressives or feared by conservatives. The real issue is not what liberal dominance of higher education is doing to our culture, but what the political conditions surrounding the discussion about it is doing to progressive liberalism.

  The basic problem is a kind of negative feedback loop. Conservative accusations of elitism can cause defensive reactions that, perversely, can encourage that very elitism. One reason for this is that accusations of elitism can cause liberal status-threat anxiety. (And perhaps reasonably so: it is reasonable to worry about those who think you are corrupting the minds of the youth.) But status-threat anxiety, as I argued earlier, whether in response to a real threat or a perceived one, can itself feed arrogance. Think of it this way: if you are forced to defend why there are so few conservatives in the academy, it is very tempting to conclude the reason is that they tried but failed (or would have failed had they tried). In other words, the worry is not liberal dominance in the academy, but the fact that in the current social conditions, liberal thinking can play into our very human tendency to believe our own hype, which means accepting that progressive liberalism alone can be the standard-bearer for reason.28

  Here’s another way to describe the worry. Earlier I noted that there is a long-standing philosophical debate about whether we can justify our political arrangements by reason and experience alone (the traditional liberal view) or whether we also need to appeal to custom and tradition (the traditional conservative view). But that philosophical question has been almost entirely replaced by a different one: whether contemporary progressive liberals (the people, not the theory) are more rational—whether they are smarter than conservatives, just by virtue of being liberal. This new question is troubling for all sorts of reasons. The self-conception that one’s tribe just knows more, whether or not it is correct, can lead, if we are not careful, to confusing a commitment to truth with a commitment to one’s own superiority. That is a hallmark of the kind of bad faith that I’ve argued is part and parcel of intellectual arrogance. And this is exactly the sort of arrogance that can also lead to not taking the opposition seriously enough, to underestimating them, and to confusing ridicule with effective opposition. It’s the sort of bad faith that can lead to the election of authoritarian despots.

  The Politics of Contempt

  It is very possible that as you’ve been reading this book, you have been alternating between two different feelings. One is a feeling of recognition: you’ve thought something along the lines of “Yeah, their arrogance really is dangerous!” The other is indignation: “We’re not being arrogant (in doing X). We’re just being reasonable!” This back-and-forth feeling is understandable, but if I’m right, it is also a symptom of the problem.

  Not long ago I was at a barbecue at the house of a well-known scientist at an Ivy League university. We had just returned from attending a workshop on political polarization together. As we stood beside the grill, drinking beer, he turned to me and remarked, “You know, as much as I admire open-mindedness and civility and all that, I can’t help feeling that right now is not the time. Screw them.” He was talking, of course, about politics, and Trumpian conservatives in particular.

  The anger that my colleague was giving voice to is probably familiar to all of us. I know I often feel it; it is hard not to, it seems, in contemporary America, and not just on the Left. It has been something of a mantra for many hard-line conservatives for some time, as even the most casual listener of hard-Right radio programs, or reader of Alt-Right blogs, well knows.

  A telling
example is the case of the Listen First Project. Founded by moderately conservative, Christian graduate student Pearce Godwin, it aims to encourage people to “listen first and vote second.” Its mission is noble: to encourage productive dialogue nationwide. But Listen First became tremendously controversial when it held its first national meeting (with numerous high-level speakers) in Charlottesville, Virginia, the locale a year earlier of a violent protest by white supremacists that had ended in the murder of a counterdemonstrator. Many local activists took Godwin’s call to listen as directed at them, and they saw it as code for “sit down and shut up.” Godwin protested that this was not his intention, yet for many people, the call to “listen first” in Charlottesville was deeply offensive. Many of the racists marching in Charlottesville were self-described Nazis who had chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” Who wants to listen first to Nazis? Screw them.

  The misgivings about attempts to dialogue extend beyond just wanting not to hear vile chants. The worry is that sometimes being tolerant of intolerance can encourage it. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda for the Third Reich, famously said that the greatest joke on democracy was that it gave its enemies the means by which it could be destroyed. By this he meant that democratic freedoms could be used to undermine those same freedoms, to turn people against them.

  As Jason Stanley has emphasized, it is not difficult to see that this same tactic is at work right now by the Alt-Right Nazis of the day. The white supremacists marching in Charlottesville were using democratic protections of free speech and assembly to endorse deeply antidemocratic views—views according to which nonwhites should (literally) be second-class citizens. And the same tactics, one might argue, can be seen on the pages of Breitbart and tumbling out of the president’s Twitter rants. Some conspiracy theorists repeatedly endorsed the idea that the murder of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a politically motivated hoax and argued that they were just “acting as reporters” and “investigating the truth.” One can’t object to that, right? Well, actually one can, unless one thinks that looking things up on 4chan and inventing things out of whole cloth amounts to journalism. Such conspiracy theorists are using democratic means (free speech protections) to undermine democracy.